Hunter pet
The hunter pet is a hunter's constant companion as they travel through Azeroth and Outland. When fighting solo or in small groups, a hunter's pet acts as a tank allowing the hunter to maintain the range hunters require to do their best in battle. When not tanking, pets can be used to do damage in addition to the hunter's shots and stings. Taming To obtain a pet, the hunter must use his Tame Beast skill on a valid beast family monster exactly their level or lower. Upon starting the taming process, the hunter's armor is decreased by 100% and they cannot perform any other actions, or else the taming fails. The taming process takes 20 seconds, which does not increase with every hit, but can be interrupted. With Patch 3.02 beastmaster hunters gained the ability to tame additional rare pet types. Taming Tips: * Hunter abilities such as Concussive Shot, Wyvern Sting, and Freezing Trap can slow or stop a beast, reducing hits to the hunter which allows for easier taming. ** Try this: lay a trap, and wait for your cooldown. Then pull your target across the trap. Once it is iced, lay another one nearby, and back off even further. Then begin taming. Thanks to the new combat traps, your target should not even touch you! ** It's best to freeze some beasts, as a few of them have knockback abilities and will interrupt the taming process (forcing you to start over). * Using Aspect of the Monkey can reduce hits during taming. * A good way to tame a pet is to ask a mage for help. It's possible to tame a pet that is sheeped. This also works with the druid spell hibernate. * The Scare Beast ability can also be helpful in conjunction with traps and shots. * Draenei can cast Gift of the Naaru on themselves just before beginning a tame. Don't wait until you need it as you can't cast it after the tame begins. Feeding In order for your pet to maintain happiness (a good mood), you must feed it. Pets eat up to six different types of food: meat, bread, fish, fruit, fungus, and cheese. Some pets, like wolves, will only eat meat, but bears and boars can eat any of the six food types. It is easiest to feed pets that eat meat, bread, and fish because mobs often drop meats, fish can be fished, and bread can be conjured by a mage as pet food. Feeding pets is very important. The happier a pet is, the more damage it deals. If you neglect to feed a pet for too long, the pet may run away! With patch 3.02 it became much easier to make a pet happy, from taming to happy it needs only two feedings of appropriate level. See Pet Feeding for more info. See also below on Abilities that generate happiness. Fighting alongside your pet Generally, one will send the pet in from a distance and allow it to get aggro on the mob before the hunter starts shooting. It is possible to have the pet fight one mob while the hunter attacks another. Note: the hunter will not gain loot or experience from a mob the pet kills solo. This is a deliberate decision by Blizzard, not a bug. If you intend on pulling mutiple mobs and having your pet kill one or more of them while you focus on others then it is best to try to get at least one shot or hit on each of the mobs then allow your pet to do his/her work on them. You can set your pet on aggressive and have it auto-attack. This is generally not a good idea. However, this is a very good idea if you would like to gain a few levels faster then you normaly would in another mode. An aggressive pet will typically draw in additional mobs that you and your party are unprepared to handle. Failing to control your pet is a sure route to causing a wipe in an instance. The aggressive setting have somewhat more useful results in a battleground, but optimal use of a pet would be a coordinated attack with the hunter, not off on its own. Tamable Beasts There are 23 families of pets for hunters to tame, with 5 of them exclusive to the expansion. Each family has its own skills, diet, and statistics. With patch 3.02 hunter pets have been completely reworked. Pet families now are divided into the three classes Cunning, Ferocity and Tenacity. All pets of a class share the same stats and the same skill tree. Each pet family has one special skill. It seems special characteristics that some rare pets used to have were removed. All Cunning pets have +5% Health, +5% Armor and +5% Damage. All Ferocity pets have +5% Health, +0% Armor and +10% Damage. All Tenacity pets have +10% Health, +5% Armor and +0% Damage. (exotic) means the pet can only be tamed by hunters with the 51-point talent Beast Mastery. (WotLK) means the pet will only be available after the expansion Wrath of the Lich King arrives. Pet diets Meat is the easiest food type to obtain. Pets that will only eat meat are not difficult to feed. Fish is not much trouble either, if you are willing to fish; you can hunt coastal humanoids, like murlocs, as well. Pets that will eat neither of these take a little more effort and planning. Dumpster pets, boars and bears, that eat just about anything, are really nice from an inventory management standpoint. You can toss the odd food drops at them. Besides food, however there are now abilities that generate happiness such as Guard dog and Carrion Feeder. Caster stats Caster Stats no longer Exist! Pet skills Pet skills come in two types—passive enhancement skills, and active skills. Passive skills change the pet's stats and do not require resources. Each pet family has one special skill (usually active). Further skills can be learned from the pet skill tree depending on the pet class. Most active skills require focus—a constantly-recharging point pool that works exactly like a Rogue Energy bar. Some active skills are free. Every Pet has 100 focus. Active skills can be activated in several ways: * automatically by setting them on autocast by rightclicking the skill icon in either the spellbook or pet action bar * by clicking the skill icon in either the spellbook or the pet action bar * by macros like /cast. An active skill does not have to be in the pet action bar to be used, even on autocast. It is perfectly ok to leave Growl in the spellbook and have it on autocast. If using a /cast macro, the skill can be adressed as if it were a hunter skill, so if the pet has the skill "Taunt", /cast Taunt will taunt the current target. Beginning with Patch 1.7, Blizzard has started introducing special active pet skills. Each skill can only be used by one type of pet and has a specific benefit that is quite useful, usually in PvE. This increases the diversity among hunters pets and usually promotes hunters possessing several pets at the same time. It is expected that with time Blizzard will continue to add special skills to other beasts' types, as well. With Patch 3.02, the following aspects of hunter pet training became obsolete: pet trainers, learning skills from wild beasts, loyalty. Newly tamed beasts that are six or more levels below the hunter´s level will have their level increased to five levels below the hunter´s level. Pets also level much faster, and gain happiness faster from feeding. Training your pet Pets below your level gain experience by fighting alongside you (as long as the mob killed is green or higher). When the pet reaches the hunter's level, it stops gaining experience until the hunter levels up. Pets gain approximately the same experience from kills as an unrested character of the same level, and require a much lower amount of experience to level as a character of the same level. With Patch 3.02 the experience required to level was drastically reduced. The pet's available talent points at any given time are determined by its level, with a maximum of 13 reached at level 68. A beastmaster hunter can add four more pet talent points with a hunter talent. You can assign the pet talent points in the talent window, pet tab. Hunter pets can unlearn their talents at hunter pet trainers. See: Pet builds See: Pet talents Pet scaling Pets receive attribute bonuses depending on their master's stats. The amount is 15%: * 1 ranged attack power gives the pet 0.22 AP and 0.1287 spell damage * 1 stamina gives 0.3 stamina * 1 resistance gives 0.4 resistance * 1 armor gives 0.35 armor Appearance As WoW is an RPG, you may find that you want a pet that looks visually appealing to you, be that 'looks good' or 'looks menacing'. Be aware that there are a couple of other appearance factors. Phobias and PvP There are ways of messing with the player controlling the character you are PvPing, and playing on phobias is one of them. Spiders are a so-so pet family, but their appearance and realistic scuttling animation can be quite intimidating to an arachnophobic player. The scorpids are a good phobia candidate. Neither serpents nor wind serpents look realistic enough to elicit fear. Size The pet's size is directly related to the level of the pet. Many beasts will dramatically shrink right before your eyes the moment they are tamed. They will enlarge as they level. Flying pets Flying pets maintain a more or less fixed distance above the ground, essentially hovering rather than flying. Flying pets' models, particularly the wings, interfere with mouse clicking, blocking access to select what is beyond them. This can work both for you and against you, but you will probably find it at least a little annoying. Note that as the pet levels, it gets bigger, and the wingspan gets larger, making the effect greater. Low-slung pets Low slung pets, like crabs and scorpids can fit into places taller pets cannot go. This is not a highly significant feature, but it does occasionally come up. Bragging rights Face it, this is important. If you want a prestige pet the obvious choices are: * unique skin, like the pink flamingo. * hard to get pets, like a level 19 Horde character with a ravager or a level 19 Alliance character with a dragonhawk. * anything that can no longer be tamed - Blizzard grandfathers current owners. You have to either luck out and fall into this, or have an eye for a problematic pet which will become untamable. Death Ravager is an example. Grimtotem Spirit Guide is another. Matching pets You can match some hunter pets and small pets, or even mounts, if theme is your thing. Non-Tamable Beasts Many types of beasts in the wild cannot be tamed as a hunter pet. These are: Not all beasts within the tamable families are tamable. Normal rank and file beasts usually are, individually named beasts may or may not be, and any beast that is notably odd is probably not tamable. Beast size critters, like cows and deer, are never tamable. External links Category:Hunters Category:Game terms